The Amazon Whisperer (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazon-whisperer <comment><USER2> Now _this_ is a capitalist. This guy is what happens when you make it easy for someone to go make a new-and-improved product.

<comment><USER3> Now that he's on the news the patent trolls will get to him. Wait and see...

<comment><USER4> Can you clarify this statement? It's not clear to me that this business model necessarily violates patents. It seems like they're just taking already well- established products and tweaking them. Then they're applying marketing techniques to get to the top of Amazon and Ebay searches...

<comment><USER5> It likely doesn't violate patents, but that has never stopped patent trolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great article with a stellar business model. This guy's scheme is literally "give the people what they want!" Need more of this kind of thinking in software. Unfortunately, lock-in techniques will likely prevent it from working in many places it's needed most.

</comment><comment><USER7> Less than stellar reviews.

[http://www.amazon.com/Ivation-Waterproof-Bluetooth- Handsfree...](http://www.amazon.com/Ivation-Waterproof-Bluetooth-Handsfree- speakerphone/dp/B005Z3GINK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1451500588&sr=8-2&keywords=hipe+speaker)

<comment><USER8> au contraire: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQ5TDLC](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQ5TDLC)

<comment><USER9> Does it bother anyone else that the three customer reviews on the product page all give five stars, and all three reviewers _received the product for free_ in exchange for an 'unbiased' review? (And that fact is only visible if you click each 'see more' link at the end of the truncated review). I just have a hard time believing this practice doesn't create bias, even if unintentional.

I'm finding I have to work harder to parse meaning out of Amazon reviews than I did a few years ago. I don't see how this benefits Amazon, but I also don't see them doing much to fix it.

<comment><USER10> Completely ignore amazon reviews.

They are mostly bogus these days.

Unless you can find 3 star reviews, I usually read those.

<comment><USER11> If you think a review is bogus you could always click the "no" button to indicate that the review is not helpful.

You can also report the review and tell Amazon that you think the review is bogus.

Do you have any data to back up the claim that most of the recent reviews are bogus?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, all the ones that start with "I received the complimentary product" in some form.

That's a bogus review, it's paid. You might argue free product is not payment but the IRS would then like to have a word with you (ask the people who got "free" cars from Oprah).

<comment><USER12> This is fairly anecdotal, but I've read some people's experiences with free products for reviews. They received products while they were giving good reviews. The products stopped once a bad review was posted.

Amazon also gives free products for review (Amazon Vine) but these are made very clear with a banner above the review, and will remain part of the program so long as they continue to receive a high number of 'helpful' votes on their reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anker ([http://www.anker.com/](http://www.anker.com/)) does something very similar to this company -- except, I think, it has a smaller selection of products. Judging from reviews on Amazon, Anker is also doing very well for itself.

<comment><USER14> Anker instantly offers free replacements to anyone who posts a bad review.

<comment><USER15> It seems that policy could backfire? Eventually, they're basically subsidizing the production of bad reviews.

<comment><USER16> Possibly, depending on what rate this is happening. I'd wager that this gets them brownie points with the public, similar to a "connect with fans" approach. Chalk it up to a form of marketing and budget it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Private Label" manufacture of goods is a fairly large cottage industry. Unfortunately many of the mostly fly by night home based Alibaba arbitrage schemes fail pretty hard. I've certainly purchased these off amazon ebay etc and have found they rarely stand up to the hype. For instance, I recently purchased a WooPower dual 2.4 amp charger off Amazon. Total POS doesnt come anywhere near 2.4 amps per output. I have a suspicion the 300+ reviews are fake.

Not to throw shade on these guys but you get what you pay for.

<comment><USER7> It seems like Anker and Aukey are the only two companies I trust these days with accessories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Before us are rows of cubicles, almost entirely inhabited by bearded, > yarmulke-wearing men in crisp white shirts. These are Pikarski's buyers. > (About half of C&A Marketing's 150-person staff is Orthodox, though the > buyers division is more homogenous. "The buyer that does all the storage > products, he's the only guy I let work out of home," Pikarski says. "He's > Italian.")

Did that bother anyone else?

<comment><USER6> Jews stick together. One of reasons for their resilience and business success. Unsurprising he brought a lot of his own in on the business. They do that in upper-ranks in my area, too.

Now, you probably won't see the media report on racist hiring practices in Jewish companies as quickly as they do anti-Semitism. ;)

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's a racist hiring practice, it's religious nepotism. Mormons and scientologists often stick together in the same way (and really probably any small group of people very closely connected; immigrants often initially do the same thing in a new country as well).

<comment><USER6> It's actually both. Religious nepotism often requires discrimination based on religion.

<comment><USER19> Jewish isn't a race. It isn't necessarily racial discrimination to just hire Jewish people (a Jewish person can be white, black, whatever).

Is it discrimination based on religion? Obviously.

<comment><USER6> I was referring to the fact that they mostly hire people that are (a) Jews and (b) Jewish. Jew is a race that I'm aware of. So, it's usually racist and religious discrimination.

<comment><USER20> > Jew is a race that I'm aware of.

What? No. Ashkenazim might be genetically similar, but even there, not a race. And there are also Sephardim. Also Jews from Africa? Definitely not a race.

<comment><USER6> The references here seem to disagree:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewish_Race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewish_Race)

Particularly, this statement: "Genetic studies on Jews show that most Jews worldwide bear a common genetic heritage which originates in the Middle East, and that they bear their strongest resemblance to the peoples of the Fertile Crescent.[58][59][60] The genetic composition of different Jewish groups shows that Jews share a common genetic pool dating back 4,000 years, as a marker of their common ancestral origin."

That Jew/Hebrew isn't a race is a very new claim to me. What do you have to support it?

<comment><USER21> > What do you have to support it?

Is Christian a race?

Also, this (PDF warning): [https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf181.pdf](https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf181.pdf).

<comment><USER6> We're talking about a people that share a common origin, physical traits, and genetic patterns. Not a religious doctrine.

The other commenter thinks that race doesn't exist. Most stuff I've read implied it did. Nobody doubts the existence of Christian religion.

<comment><USER21> If it was a race as we contemplate race in its current definition, it would be on the government form I posted.

It isn't. It's not a race like that (nor, really, in any other way).

Yes, some Jews have a common genetic pattern.

Many don't.

Either you're talking about the religion, which is clearly not a race (as you said). Or you're talking about a group that generally shares the same religion, that descended from a few groups that lived co-located thousands of years ago. Of course, many are descended from those groups. What makes that a race?

And I didn't mention Christianity to ask if anyone doubted it existed. I mentioned Christianity to show how silly it is to consider Jews a race. If Christianity isn't a race (even though many Christians descend from a common ancestor _), then Jews aren 't a race.

_ \- Technically, if you are a Christian, you probably believe you descended from Adam & Eve, sort of the ultimate common ancestor.

<comment><USER6> Finally, a comment with some specific counterpoints. I appreciate it. So, you're saying that many works just wrongly conflate concepts of a group and race to the point that there's a misconception about the existence of a Jewish race? Also, given the form, that there are only 5 races in existence?

<comment><USER21> Sorry for taking forever to reply.

That's pretty much what I'm saying. I think the 5 races on the form conform to my understanding of race, so I think that part is right as well.

I guess fundamentally I can't wrap my head around the idea of identifying a religious group and calling that a race. As I mention, we don't do it with any other religious group, so why Jews?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its interesting to think about why this enterprise succeeds and yet Quirky, for example stumbled: this one starts with a known selling product and iterates on it based on market demand, rather than just coming up with cool ideas, perhaps. (I'm actually a fan of Quirky so this isn't really intended as a dis, but one of these two has "nine-figure" (really?) sales, and one doesn't)

<comment><USER23> This is complete speculation:

Quirky likely had far more scruples and far less connections than these guys, plus I bet Quirky had far less balls when it came to negotiating with a vendor.

These buyers are likely expert and negotiating the price down, or even playing vendors against each other, to get the costs as low as possible.

Their savvy in being able to react quickly with a response product is likely largely driven by their business accumen in this regard...

Quirky was too altruistic in the way they likely handled the manufacturing.

Remember, success in business can often be a reward for some pretty shitty behaviors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Like Amazon, is there any goldmine for software where I can go and find what users want after having used different software products?

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmm. My product reviews on Amazon often consist of lists of desired improvements - and none of them have ever been implemented.

</comment><comment><USER26> Should be marked (2013)

<comment><USER27> Thanks, added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Unable to get past full screen interstitial ad.

<comment><USER29> As in you can't emotionally "get past" it? Or you didn't see the "skip ad" link?

<comment><USER28> With Ghostery enabled, it won't go away.

<comment><USER30> Ghostery is not the best idea if you're looking for privacy, because it comes from the ad industry. Consider independents like uBlock, Privacy Badger, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Century of "Shrill": How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women's Voices - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices <comment><USER2> It's a bit of a stretch to connect such ancient data on recording and playback technology - their _most recent_ citation is from 1933! - with a drop in female voice pitch. Microphones and playback quality have come a long way (tinny phone speakers notwithstanding).

If there has been a desire to lower voice pitch to sound more authoritative/less "shrill", I suspect it's much more of a general social issue than a technological one.

<comment><USER3> _Microphones and playback quality have come a long way_

The _technology_ has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers make. Recording microphones are _not_ flat, they are treated as musical instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue, AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as pleasing when using the same recording setup.

The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you can find it).

<comment><USER2> It's just that the article is mostly talking about AM radio, and they'd be dealing with stuff like 1920s carbon mics. So maybe modern mics could still be causing issues if they're chosen for a specific male voice type, but it's a stretch to apply 1920s data directly to the modern day. Everything's still a lot more accurate overall.

<comment><USER3> They also reference modern lossy compression which also predominately affects very low and very high frequencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fascinating article historically, but I find it hard to believe it has much relevance to how women speak or are perceived today.

I've done a lot of voice coaching, and a _lot_ of people -- men and women -- don't speak at the pitch that is healthiest and most relaxed for their vocal apparatus. Some are higher, some are lower.

Because pitch is often very cultural _and_ emotional. People's pitch varies when they speak different languages, or even dialects/accents. And _everyone 's_ pitch increases when they're more emotional, and decreases when they're more relaxed -- a deeper, more relaxed voice _relative to your normal pitch_ conveys confidence and control in both men _and_ women. Actors learn to change their pitch (and breathing, volume, resonance, etc.) to whatever is called for in the part.

I appreciate that early telephones may have clipped consonants for women, being designed for men's voices -- but if anything that's the _opposite_ of "shrill". In any case, audio quality today is spectacular so it's certainly no longer the case.

So while pitch is a fascinating subject, I don't really find myself buying into the notion that female speech patterns are a result of pressure from male norms, whether technological or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER5> Men are also frequently advised to lower the tone of their voice to convey more gravitas. This is for personal interactions - nothing to do with electronic bandwidth.

Besides, electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices.

(I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS, and cell phones are the worst. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since I got my first cell phone in the early 90's.)

<comment><USER6> > electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so > should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier > for me to understand than POTS

Then you give exactly an example where it is not ample (and matches the topic of the article):

POTS:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service)

"Restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz"

<comment><USER5> True, but POTS isn't used for mass media. Politicians have never phoned me to campaign for my vote.

<comment><USER6> > but POTS isn't used for mass media.

Yes. Still, also if one would measure the response curves of the sound reproductions of most of mass media available to most of the listeners, one would again find that the curves are never flat.

And there are indeed a lot of devices that behave worse in the range related to female voices than to some bass voice ranges. Even the so called Hi-Fi equipment is never "flat" (i.e. it never passes different frequencies the same). A lot of people claim to prefer stronger basses, a lot of products are made to amplify them more, and even relative expensive speakers can sound worse for female voice frequency ranges. Not to mention that most of the conditions where the sound is eventually heard are extremely far from the conditions under which the products are evaluated by the reviewers.

<comment><USER5> I listen to a lot of music on my stereo, including many female singers with lovely voices, and do not notice any bias or shrillness in them, nor with any of the higher pitched instruments.

<comment><USER6> I have a counterexample which I think is more telling: never when I listen to music I recognize the relevant bias in sound equipment or sound engineering, it is when I listen movies that I do, and I observe it especially when I listen to non-English female voices (which I indeed happen to listen a lot, living where I live). But I'm sure that I'm not only one who notice that, as well as I am sure that not everybody's going to experience it, as there are multiple factors that allow me to be able to claim that. Human hearing has a complex response curves itself, and age and different other conditions result in specific curves among some people, which makes me unfortunate enough to be one of those who are more aware of the limitations of the sound equipment and of the ways the sound is processed by the professionals.

Once one is affected, one can more easily recognize that even professionals are aware of many aspects the sound is not "how it should be" but that the resulting sound is not the same as the "real thing" and also not "optimally adjusted" for the final listening conditions.

Sound engineering, to those who aren't doing it, appears to be "simple", and it's true that today we have much more good processing capabilities than in the days of only analog devices, but even now there are many issues that greatly influence the end result. And as I mentioned, not all languages and all fashions affecting how people speak are the same, resulting in different aspects affecting different people differently.

Did you know, for example, that women and men, on average, but even more significantly in the "tails" of distribution not only have different voice characteristics (how they produce the sound) but also different response curves, that is, that they hear the sounds differently?

<comment><USER5> I don't dispute any of that. What I don't buy, however, is that there's some electronic conspiracy among sound engineers to make women's voices sound bad. I don't buy that powerful female artists (like Madonna) would put up with that. I don't buy that the record companies, who want to sell those records by female artists, would put up with that.

Lastly, if it takes a highly trained ear to pick up differences, then the difference is not material to the public and it's an ineffective conspiracy (assuming there is one).

<comment><USER6> > What I don't buy, however, is that there's some electronic conspiracy among > sound engineers to make women's voices sound bad

It's not claiming "conspiracy" stating the facts that the sound transmission was almost always not optimized to produce best result for female voices and that male voices were more lucky. I studied electrical engineering and I can confirm that the simplified claims were taught as:

"voice frequency is 300 to 3400 Hz"

which effectively misses the higher frequencies that unfortunately disfavors understanding of female voices, but nobody learns _that_ detail there:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency)

or that most of the products sold for music also disfavor female voices versus the "bass effect" \-- you'll find infinite amount of "bass boost" speakers and earphones (even those that claim they don't typically do that) and much less (I couldn't find any where it's even stated as a goal of the design) those that allow the best understanding of voices instead of distractedly "pumping" the bass line.

Using Madonna as an argument is weak. Compare how much actors earn compared to the actresses and how much actresses ever could influence the movie industry result. Music business is similar -- female artists are surely limited in what they can achieve regarding how their music is being played, and they surely can't change the preferences of the whole industries. I guarantee you that female voices come worse than they should even in modern times and especially in movies and TV (not in pop music) and that it can be easily heard by anybody who is interested in the topic.

Do your own research about what the "industry" spreads as a "common knowledge" and "what people want" as of today -- it's never real fidelity or a linear response. It's primarily "how can music sound louder than the competition." And "more bass."

Decades ago I knew an old sound engineer who always carried around his own amplifier and earphones to compensate his hearing loss. He was showing me his own measurements (graphs), and how almost everything claiming by the producers of the earphones were lies (exactly regarding fidelity). He worked really hard to select the earphones that worked "correctly enough".

The original article, the way I understood it, also doesn't claim conspiracy? It seems like a classic straw man. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging > effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average > frequency of female speech dropped twenty-three hertz between 1945 and 1993. > Margaret Thatcher famously worked with voice coaches to hone her auditory > image, dropping her voice sixty hertz between the nineteen-sixties and the > nineteen-eighties. One of the most notable of the many bizarre deceptions in > the Theranos saga involved Elizabeth Holmes's deep voice; when I analyzed > recordings of her speaking I found that the disparity between what is likely > her real voice and her performative one is around a hundred hertz, which, in > that range, is equivalent to nearly half an octave.

Wow -- this is absolutely fascinating. I always dismissed Elizabeth Holmes' low voice as a weird quirk, but now I realize there's actually a pretty concrete (and sad) historical rationale to it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If anyone thinks the sound of one's voice has anything to do with how seriously one ought to be taken.... listen to these bad dude's speak:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG- xC8Mu6SM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM)

</comment><comment><USER9> Related: [https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how- radio-...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-made- female-voices-sound-shrill)

</comment><comment><USER10> What I always found interesting how children in the US sound "shrill" to my European ear, I think children have much lower voices here in Europe (Germany). Anyone else with the same perception? Or is it just in my imagination?

<comment><USER11> Indeed there seem to be pitch differences between languages, and between regions of the same language. Don't know about kids, but here is some data for adults:

[https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01](https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01) /language- pitch.html

<comment><USER12> Interesting link. As a Hungarian I can definitely confirm that foreign women's speech does seem overly high-pitched. Especially in English, but also in German to some degree. In a similar way as Americans in general come across as overly fakey-smiley positive, to me, subjectively, women's speech in English feels over-the-top. (Don't get offended, I'm just describing perceptions)

To be more concrete, here's a random example of what sounds natural in Hungarian: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In related news, there was an experiment where Hillary and Trump's genders were swapped - it turned out a female Trump was _more_ popular than the male version: [https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a- wom...](https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-woman-youd- like-him-more.html)</comment>


Is the first year of a degree a waste of time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11676192

<comment><USER2> The first year of a degree teaches students what 6th forms used to in the old days. Fix the dumbing down in state schools first. A-levels have been devalued by politically driven grade inflation, so let's take it out of the hands of the politicians altogether and switch to the IB.

<comment><USER3> There is great political pressure in most countries to "improve" the education of the population. This runs into other political, demographic, and scientific realities and produces some ironic consequences. For example, in the US, we have a higher and higher percentage of the population entering college each year. That means that the average IQ of those entering college gradually declines. (It wouldn't if the Flynn Effect still functioned, but gains from the Flynn Effect in the US ended 20-30 years ago.) The top 10% has a higher average IQ than the top 20%, which is itself greater than for the top 30%, etc. The higher the percentage going to college, the lower the average IQ of college students, and the colleges have to adjust to avoid an embarrassing rise in drop-out rates.

I saw statistics a week or so ago showing a gradual rise in the percentage of students who take calculus in high school, a gradual rise in the percentage who take Algebra 1 in eighth grade (instead of in 9th, 10th, etc.), and other stats that would seem to imply a gradual increase in math ability for any given age cohort. Yet, within a day or two, I also saw stats showing a gradual decrease in math ability for high school graduates entering college. In 1995, the College Board could no longer continue with the old SAT and had to "renormalize" it to get the mean score back up to 500. They had to dumb it down, in other words.

I've seen stats and reports from other countries (including Japan) that show the same trends. People demand that the schools do a better job of getting kids ready for college by, for example, having more of them take algebra in 8th grade. So, it happens, except that they aren't really any better prepared than before, so to prevent the embarrassment of rising failure rates, the course has to be dumbed down. The apparent increase in math ability is achieved by a relabeling of what they do, not by an increase in how much they learn. There is now a growing trend in Illinois for students (I assume from Chicago) to take calculus in high school and then end up in remedial math in college. They're not learning anything, but for political reasons they are given classes labeled "calculus" to show "progress toward social justice". I assume Illinois is representative of many other places in many countries.

<comment><USER4> This is spot on, and in theory, it's why standardized testing was implemented in the first place: to get at normative ways to compare knowledge in a given subject across schools and learning environments. It was social engineering, really: by convincing schools that their students would be held accountable to universal standards, those schools would in turn up their games and make sure students were learning the real deal.

Of course, what actually happened was twofold:

1\. "Teaching to the test," i.e., narrowing a broad subject area like Calculus down to whatever aspects would be covered on a standardized AP exam.

2\. Following from the above, a reduction in foundational and principle education in favor of problem-based education. Kids would learn the what of the formulas, but not the why. Kids could calculate a derivative, but they couldn't tell you what it meant or why they would ever need to do so.

The result? A vicious cycle. Subjects narrowed and became divorced from their foundational purposes, which accordingly made them more about rote than about thinking, which made them less engaging subjects, which in turn discouraged student interest, which in turn led to declining scores. And the cycle repeated itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Generally the first year is a bridging year. You have students with a wide variety of different backgrounds and they all need to be bought up to the same base. It's also the first time many students will have to learn for themselves as opposed to being spoonfed.

So while you do learn less in the first year than the other two, it still has a lot of value, because you learn how to learn and many other personal skills which are critical for university and later life.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the UK experience is different than US, but this sounds like 'no child left behind'. Let's make 50% of the students do inane coursework for a year so the other 50% don't feel bad about requiring an extra year to finish university. We'll call it 'personal improvement'. While it definitely takes a year to adjust to being on your own, the average US freshman experience calcifies the mind.

Example: I had 2 dorm friends with 1600 SAT scores that wasted their life away that first year because they already knew the material (like most of us). They got cocky and promptly got a 1.0 the next year when they finally had to work but didn't realize it, losing their scholarships. Freshman year is the best time to pump students with work because they are expecting/wanting a challenge. The first year should be about inspiring students to learn, not teaching them how to deal with insane amounts of free time.

<comment><USER7> This! Exactly! I'm currently in my first year and bored out of my skull with the material we're covering. Last week we spent going over the Data Protection Act in comp sci... the DPA is part of the standard grade course and I learnt it inside out in S3. I came to uni expecting a challenge - a new level of learning, but I'm so far left wanting.

<comment><USER8> Which means you are in an excellent position of having too much time and not enough to do. Don't waste this opportunity!

It takes a very long time to become awesome at something, so I'd suggest you start now while you have plenty of spare time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The quality of UK university courses varies tremendously. I studied engineering as did lots of my friends. The standard course length for an MEng is 4 years, I think that might even be a requirement to get the course accredited.

But what happens in those four years can be very different - if you are at a less good university, you will probably be working less than 20 hours a week on your engineering degree. If you are at a top university, you will work at least full time if not more.

So if this proposal was followed through you could end up with a slightly odd situation (or maybe a good situation?) where the less good universities offered shorter courses than the good ones. So the brightest students would be in uni for longer.

</comment><comment><USER9> In AU, my first year in my mechanical engineering degree was a complete waste of time. They call it a "common first year" where you do little bits of every type of engineering. It was a complete waste of time and money.

In theory it sounds great, and I was quite excited about doing some electrical engineering. But in fact it was just a 6 month long, highschool physics course on electricity, drawn out more than I thought possible. Spending an entire week on Ohm's law in University engineering is stupid.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know, I feel that I got as much out of first year as the other years, sure you could say it wasn't as focused on the central theme of the course but I didn't go to uni just to focus on one thing and get it done asap.

Some of the maths was repeated but really helped me get a better grasp on it. The physics class was the only physics I got exposed to in uni and was hard but rewarding, same with the circuits stuff for electronics. As opposed to some of my recent 4th year classes, which have actually been a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER11> For me, it was my first time away from home, and I wasn't certain of my major. So it was useful as a self-discovery experience.

But my friend, who is going to school in his town is finding the first (and even the second) year pretty useless. And it was sad that his freshman English class consisted of determining correct comma placement. I hope it's just the school and not the dumbing down of education across the board. So scary.

</comment><comment><USER12> For my degree (Computer Science at Warwick), the first year did count towards my final results. Even without it counting, I feel it would have been fairly difficult to adequately teach Computer Science without the 'extra' year at the start.

<comment><USER13> So how much were you able to actually get into CS your first year?? I was limited to mostly programming 1 & 2... you couldn't get into any higher level CS studies until you had those two classes completed, and you couldn't take them at the same time. That led to a lot of fun side projects, no doubt, but that was when I wasn't falling asleep in my under-water basket weaving class. I often wonder if a technical program at a computer-specific school would have yielded the same results for much less dime.

<comment><USER12> Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: \- A basic mathematics course, took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more advanced things \- Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. \- An introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze \- A basic hardware and lower-level concepts course \- Data structures, ie what ones are available and their efficiencies \- A unix programming module, basically we made some dead simple command line programs \- Some functional programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

<comment><USER13> Wow... you were already in discreet math & shell programming in your first year. I was stuck with calc 1 & 2, and didn't get to touch a unix shell until my second year "networking" class where we spent two months setting up subnets. I didn't get to touch on any harware stuff until year 3, where we mapped out ALUs, RAM chips, etc. Sounds like your universities CS program had it's shit together a little more than mine. Oh well though.. the lack of interesting topics for the first 2 years only drove me to learn on my own and do side projects, which ended up ok in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Depends where you go, I guess. My university was willing to acknowledge advanced coursework I'd done in high school, so I didn't waste the entire year repeating material I'd already covered (calculus, introductory programming, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER15> A few classmates of mine knew more about the subject in 1st year than I did when I graduated in the 4th year. I received the same First Class Honours classification that they did.

That's one messed up ramp.

</comment><comment><USER16> The first year was the best year! And I went on for another 6 ones. I didn't know much programming at that time and just the feeling of working and being around really smart people was really good.

</comment><comment><USER17> Currently attending engineering at u of waterloo in Canada. In my own experience, most of first year was a waste of time. Due to my luck in highschool as well as my own personal interests, I found 80% of first year to be review, or ridiculously slow. The most important part of first year for me was a relatively low stress environment to make friends with (particularly important in my program).

But I saw with many (not all) of my classmates just how important that first year was. Unfortunately, the differences between people's high school educations were just so much (there were some people who were having problems with limits... I was breezing all the way up to multi variable calculus and linear algebra) that as useless as individual courses may be for individual students, taken as a whole (as a class), all those 'review' classes were definitely necessary to prevent massive massive 2nd year fail rates.

Unfortunately this is not a problem that can only be solved by universities. They have their role to play, but so does our (by this I mean our province's) high school curriculum. In Toronto (where I grew up), we had integration (and almost derivatives) ripped out of standard grade 12 calculus (as well as a series of similar neuterings in other subjects). To get that stuff at all, your school had to offer honors, AP, or IB calculus or w/e. I lucked out with AP being available (which despite all the taunting I directed at the College Board did actually set me up for my first year university courses). But many bright smart kids just aren't lucky enough to attend to a school with such programs. Or even just average or slightly above average kids weren't pushed by the challenge, or dragged along by their smarter classmates.

In the end, (at least in Canada), I cannot see first year becoming any harder (or useful) until universities know that enough of their enrollees will be knowledgeable enough. Because ultimately, they are run as businesses on some level, and have to keep a float. Which is the biggest shame.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the move to summer classes. It hampers the classic 'work part-time during the school year, full time during the summer' for people bearing the full brunt of their educational bills, but otherwise I think it's a good idea. Summer, to me, is just a waste of time in which to forget what you learned.

Coincidentally, I have not taken a summer break from classes for 3 years now.</comment>


Study Fundamentals, Not APIs, Tools nor OSes - <AUTHOR> http://www.warplife.com/tips/code/career/fundamentals.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this in response to the commonly-stated requirements in job board posts, as well as emailed inquiries from recruiters, that demand specific numbers of years for the technologies that are expected to be applied to the given job.

Rather more important than having five years experience with Java, say, is to know how to write Java code that works well, that implements products your users enjoy, that gets good reviews from the trade press, that sells well, and is maintainable not just by those who come after you, but by you yourself, at a later time.

In my own experience it is quite uncommon for not just interviewers, but actual hiring managers, to ask me what I have actually accomplished. They seem to assume that anyone with a certain number of years with a technology, will be good enough to get the job done.

I myself have no problem shipping products using technologies that I have no clue about when hired.

Similarly, there are some technologies that I have lots of experience with, that continue to stymie me, such as regular expressions.</comment>


Dear Startup: Please make branching easy - <AUTHOR>

Won't someone please form a startup to tackle this problem?  Branching sucks.  It's one of those things that every smallish-to-large company has to deal with, and it's very non-trivial.  Sure, there are a lot of complex issues, but won't someone please take a "Worse is Better" mentality and not make their tool do everything under the sun?  Here's a modest list of core concepts that seem useful:
Each individual has their own branch.  This individual can run a build of Product X and check in features and bug fixes.  But most importantly, they can check in incrementally, instead of only when the feature is fully complete.  For large projects, this would be very useful.  Each changelist would still represent a feature, but the overall project might not be ready to deploy at that point.
Each individual's branch can sync to the main branch by pressing one button, and the system tries to auto-merge the results.  Syncing is not branch merging.  It doesn't create a changelist, for example.  It should be the same process you'd go through when you're working in the main branch, only on your own branch.
Each individual can take checked-out work from the main branch and move it into another branch as a new changelist, without requiring a check-in.
Each individual can "save" their changelist at any time.  When a changelist is saved, those files are copied and stored and the changelist is reverted.  You can then fix a bug and check that in, then "restore" your saved changelist.
Auto-merge is critical.  Every step should try to auto-merge, and only show a conflict when the same part of a file has been edited by multiple people, not just when the same file has been edited by multiple people.
Here's a quote from the CEO where I work.  This was during an email conversation about branching, specifically that when you sync to the main branch it's actually a merge that creates a changelist:
"One of the key issues is the information you get from the changelist.  It's not that we don't want to see checkins, it's that the checkins that result from [merging branches] don't convey information.  Or if they do, it's not obvious and right up front like it is now.  I puruse the change list every day to see what's going on.  It's critical to my global view of what's going on."
So there you go.  Make him happy and he'll give you money.  We use Perforce, and it would be really great to have a layer on top of it to manage problems associated with branching. <comment><USER2> Give Mercurial a try. We use it now and have had great results. We've each got a few repositories floating around and it becomes very easy to isolate certain features/bugs/fixes into their own little worlds.

<comment><USER3> I second that. Very good for deployment too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hear Linus Torvalds talk about Git:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8>

</comment><comment><USER5> You describe a social, not technical problem. There is already a solution today -- it's called your manager.

This is why the tools market is the domain of a few niche companies and IMO a waste of time for startups. Pain points at the level at which you could conceivably write code are all unique to the organization. It's a consultant's game -- A branching layer like you describe will be written in PowerPoint, not emacs. Do it and get yourself a promotion.

<comment><USER6> Well said!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "One of the key issues is the information you get from the changelist. It's not that we don't want to see checkins, it's that the checkins that result from [merging branches] don't convey information. Or if they do, it's not obvious and right up front like it is now. I puruse the change list every day to see what's going on. It's critical to my global view of what's going on."

"Like it is now" <\-- What does that mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> For the most part, we all work in the mainline. Each changelist description is representative of the changelist.. That is, there aren't any "Work in Progress" titles. So our manager can read the changelist titles to see where the project is headed.

If we move everyone to their own branch, to simply sync to mainline we have to merge the mainline branch into our own. In Perforce, that means it creates a changelist that's checked in. Annoying when you're reading the unfiltered changelist titles, but there's something even more annoying: All your work has to be checked in before you merge from the mainline (otherwise you get horrible merging problems).

<comment><USER6> Whats wrong with having things checked in? If you are a real development shop, checking in is your lifeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dude, have you tried bzr already? It's exactly what you need.

<http://bazaar-vcs.org/>

<comment><USER8> ... or Mercurial, Monotone, Darcs, or Git, all of which make branching either fairly easy or utterly trivial.

<comment><USER9> Has anyone here worked extensively with both darcs and bzr? I use darcs and love it. I hear some people rave about how much better bzr is. I've used it very briefly and didn't see what the big advantage was, but maybe I'm missing something.

<comment><USER10> I switched from bzr to darcs for two reasons; `bzr pull` over HTTP is incredibly slow and darcs lets you cherry pick individual changes to record. Oh, and darcs bugs out sometimes and refuses to let me apply certain patches.

As far as I can tell, they're identical otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Guidelines - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html <comment><AUTHOR> Y'all flagmods that took CHAZ off the front page repeatedly are boring and should read the guidelines, please.</comment>


Watch the First Trailer for Steven Spielberg's Adaptation of 'Ready Player One' - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/22/watch-the-first-trailer-for-steven-spielbergs-adaptation-of-ready-player-one <comment><USER2> Question: What do people find appealing about Ready Player One? I'm a child of the eighties yet I had trouble getting through the first few chapters so I stopped. Something I rarely do since I find it hard to stop reading a book once I start. What am I missing?

<comment><USER3> It was terrible. Just an endless avalanche of 80s pop culture references loosely strung together with a horribly cliche plot and characters.

The references weren't even interesting either. It'll just be something like, "Then, I traveled to planet Bueller, where I played through the plot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off--", and then a page and a half literally describing various scenes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That's it. It adds nothing. Unless the idea of scenes from 80s movies and TV shows and video games that you are familiar with being described back to you is inherently amusing, you will probably find that this gets old very fast.

Then again - this might translate much better to the screen, in a way it didn't to the page, because A) film is a much better medium, I think, to delight the audience with familiarity than writing, and B) from the trailer it looks like the film will expand beyond just _80s_ pop culture, and intermix the references a little better than "I went to planet Star Wars and here are some scenes from Star Wars I played through". With Spielberg at the helm, I have pretty high hopes. Just don't expect, if you like the movie, to read the book and like it even more. If the film succeeds, this will be one of those very rare instances in which it's better than the material it's adapted from.

If you want to read a good novel about VR, pick up Snow Crash instead.

<comment><USER4> I was actually planning to start Snow Crash tonight, so that's funny. I liked Ready Player One quite a bit, so hopefully I enjoy Snow Crash even more. Any other good VR books? I also picked up Armada by the author of RPO, being a sucker for alien invasion sci-fi.

<comment><USER5> Neuromancer, but of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct youtube link to the trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtwpjnuaVTE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtwpjnuaVTE)

</comment><comment><USER7> I kind of feel like the trailer is lacking some 80s feels... Atomic Blonde's trailer drips with the 80s, on the other hand.

</comment><comment><USER4> HN coming down hard on this one, unsurprisingly. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, having read it a couple months back, and am pretty stoked about the movie. I do however wish the trailer focused more on (or even mentioned) the hunt i.e. the entire plot of the book; the trailer looked visually good but was kind of boring. There were a few scenes I immediately recognized though and that was cool to see!

<comment><USER8> I've never read the book.. the trailer did absolutely nothing to tell you what the movie's about. It just looked like a bunch of pop references strung together with something to do with VR in a dystopian future. I don't think I've ever seen such a bad trailer for a high budget film..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wanted to enjoy the book, but it was pretty sub-par. I admit it made me smirk when I "got" an 80's reference, but it also annoyed me how obvious it was that the book was deemed "great" just because of such a cheap, transpartent tactic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Having not read the book before, shall I read it before I see the film? Or could the film adaptation be better than book?

<comment><USER11> Read the book. It's a light and fun assembly of 80's references (for a plot- based reason!) packaged inside a VR capture-the-flag adventure. My son read it a few weeks ago and enjoyed it while getting none of the references... we had a fun weekend chasing down arcades with video games from the book (Joust features at a key early plot point).

Could the film be better than the book? Hmmm... Can you think of any VR movie that's better than the book it's based on? I can't either.

I'm not optimistic about the movie, but what I like about the trailer is how they seemed to have licensed a fair bit of 80's nostalgia (I loved seeing the Iron Giant in there, the Delorean from BTTF, Freddy Kruger getting blasted) which is really the important trick for adapting this book. (i.e. I really hope they licensed Ultraman.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The fun thing about it, is that Spielberg directs the movie. (Also, the book should lend itself to a movie adaption.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Overdose of memberberries Guaranteed box office

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is this on HN? Just an ordinary scifi movie, no? Based on a kind of mediocre bestseller?

<comment><USER15> Marketing.</comment></comment>


Rubber that can make and store power from light and vibration - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/18/national/fukushima-professor-develops-rubber-can-make-store-power-light-vibration/ <comment><USER2> If it can convert vibration into electricity, does this imply that it would be a good sound-dampening material (for smaller space requirements than e.g. foam?)

Alternately, would this imply that it would be a good solid-state _microphone_?

<comment><USER3> There are solid-state microphones, based on piezoelectric materials

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They say it's magnetic rubber, which would explain movement to electricity, but light? How can magnets capture light energy?

<comment><USER5> Electron excitation

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what kind of applications this could have beyond robotics. Could material like this be used in space?

<comment><USER7> In space, electricity is always welcome, while vibrations are usually not. So to the first approximation, sure, why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So Vibranium is not a metal after all!

<comment><USER9> We will finally have a Black Panther's suit that stores energy only to release back later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a paper?

<comment><USER11> There are a bunch here: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kunio_Shimada](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kunio_Shimada)

<comment><USER12>
         We've picked up some unusual traffic from your network and have temporarily blocked access from your IP address.

Literally never visite the whole site.

<comment><USER13> Do you use a VPN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me a bit of how flubber works in the 1960s Disney movie "The Absent-Minded Professor".

</comment><comment><USER15> This could be how the robots in Westworld got their power!</comment>


Show HN: Simple visualisation of Sigfox data with Thingstudio - <AUTHOR> http://www.thingstud.io/app/NzfB35S56ixtC2CQe/screen/z4bQSo6mY6StAdqN4 <comment><USER2> Great ! Thanks for sharing @mkarliner :)</comment>


Ask HN: How does Superhuman Mail tracks every recipient independently? - <AUTHOR> I'm very curious to know how Superhuman manages to track every recipient when an email has been sent to multiple independent recipients.
For me email read tracking is done by adding an individual pixel tracker to an email which allows the server that hosts that pixel to know if the email has been open. And it's the same pixel that is sent to all the recepients since the email is a carbon copy so impossible to distinguish between the recipients by name.
Is there any magic in the email protocols that allows to send a specific copy of the original email to each recipient while making it look like it's still the same thread? <comment><USER2> > And it's the same pixel that is sent to all the recepients since the email > is a carbon copy so impossible to distinguish between the recipients by > name.

Without going into the technical details - whenever you send a carbon copy email, its not a single email when you send an email to say 3 people, email providers charge you per recipient. That means they send 1 separate email per receipient.

if you want to consider the tech details, the email protocol opens a connection per user mailbox and sends over the body of the email to them. (that's the reason you get spam in gmail even though your email is not present in either the to or cc addresses).

if you have email aliases, try this, firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com, the reciepient should see 2 emails if sent from outside the gmail network, but would be 1 if from within gmail (since email server may de-dupe)

What you are saying will be true if you are sending to an email list. (like google groups or opensource discussion groups)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you send a different email for every recipient, you get a message ID which you can see in the headers.

When mail bounces, you get the recipient _and_ your message ID which made the mail bounce.

Usually this bounce emails are discarded; but in this case you need them to take into account non-deliverable adresses: this is your first metric (delivered ;-).

For opening: tracking pixels are your answer here.

Opening attachments: not usually tracked. PDFs (for example) can either load tracking pixels or run javascript.

Clic-thru: Tracking URLs with redirections.

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe that tracking pixels are just tied to something like a URL with a UUID as part of the filename/pathing.

When an email is opened, the browser within the email client is told to render and that then invokes a request against a webserver hosting the tracking pixels, creative images, etc.. and that is when the tracking is marked as open in the mailflow. The email is usually modified during preparation for sending with these tracking "pixels".

</comment><comment><USER5> Pixel hosted somewhere and then request fingerprinting possibly. Client , IP, country, etc</comment>


Developer releases app to remove region lock of Galaxy Note 3 - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2470551

<comment><USER2> > backporting it to devices sold in the past (aren't there laws against this?)

This could also describe Sony's behavior with the Playstation 3. Early-model PS3's contained a feature called OtherOS which allowed you to run Linux on the console in a way officially supported by Sony.

Sony later decided to remove OtherOS support from the console in a firmware update. While technically optional, the firmware update was required to play online games on the console, or play subsequently produced game discs.

IMHO it's fine if a hardware manufacturer chooses to remove features from newer models. OTOH reaching out through the cloud to remove features and cripple models that people have already bought _should_ constitute deliberate fraud against the consumer. You bought something which was advertised to do X, Y, and Z, the manufacturer deliberately removes the capability to do X after you've purchased it -- it seems like it should be totally illegal for them to do that.

If a car dealership owner decides to sell only cars without radios, that's their business decision, and it's not illegal for them to do business that way. If a car dealership owner decides to drive around town, breaking into cars people have already bought from him and removing their radios, he's going to jail and rightfully so.

Why should PS3's be any different?

Apparently, they are -- AFAIK Sony has suffered no legal consequences for its policy whatsoever.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros)

<comment><USER3> > it seems like it should be totally illegal for them to do that.

In Australia, at least, it is.

It breaks one of the consumer guarantee[1] we're given by law (fit for purpose, as an advertised feature was removed), so you're entitled to a repair, replacement or refund. After some back-and-forth with my department store (who, understandably, didn't really understand what was going on) and Sony, I got mine refunded.

[1]: [http://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/consumer-rights- guarantees](http://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/consumer-rights-guarantees)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the legal status of this?

I can't fathom why vendor locks are covered by the DMCA, but they are. (At least, that's what the Library of Congress says) so maybe this is covered too. Or not.

Maybe a bunch of customers could get together and launch a class action lawsuit?

([http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57572492-94/what-the- dmca-c...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57572492-94/what-the-dmca-cell- phone-unlock-ban-means-to-you-faq/))

> _Unfortunately, this would be very difficult for several reasons including > the fact that wireless subscribers are no longer allowed to sue their > carriers as part of a class lawsuit._

> _The problem is the U.S. Supreme Court 's 2011 decision in Concepcion v. > AT&T Mobility, in which the Court upheld the validity of class action > waivers and arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, according to Michael > Ashenbrener of Aschenbrener Law, a consumer advocacy law firm based in > Chicago._

> _" As a result of the Concepcion case, it is essentially impossible to sue a > U.S. cell phone carrier in a class action," Aschenbrener explained in an > e-mail. "Consequently, there is no effective check on the power of U.S. > wireless companies."_

Mobile phone companies suck, eh?

<comment><USER5> "As a result of the Concepcion case, it is essentially impossible to sue a U.S. cell phone carrier in a class action," Aschenbrener explained in an e-mail. "Consequently, there is no effective check on the power of U.S. wireless companies.""

So, this is a pretty inaccurate statement. It is more accurate to say "it is essentially impossible to sue them over _contract disputes_ in class action lawsuits".

Additionally, you'd probably be better off filing 10000 arbitration actions than a class action lawsuit:

1\. You can all do it in your spare time

2\. You are not required to be lawyers to interact with the arbitrators.

3\. AT&T is in no way set up to handle large scale arbitration

Heck, you could set up a firm to do nothing but manage arbitration claims against AT&T. Because it requires no licensing, you could let the moral equivalent of paralegals handle _all_ of the work.

Class action lawsuits were meant to be about efficiency, not a tool for social change.

If AT&T doesn't want that efficiency, you should show them what the result is.

<comment><USER6> Except that it's probably prohibitively difficult to convince 10,000 people individually to go to the hassle of filing an arbitration action just to get a small amount of money. I could be wrong, but I don't see this being a realistic method of going after companies for contract violations at all.

<comment><USER7> You don't think you could get 10,000 people to sign up to a web app that offers them free money and demands only that they sign the equivalent of petitions?

<comment><USER8> Don't forget that filing an arbitration case almost always requires paying a fee of some kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why do companies keep doing this crap? Is there some logical reason why they would do this?

<comment><USER10> And I say, "Don't buy from Samsung."

My own personal recommendation is to buy a Chinese phone. They're a lot more affordable, and work nearly just as well.

I wrote a bit about my phone, a Samsung Mega look-alike that I paid $200 for. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6494895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6494895)

<comment><USER11> you are dead wrong.

a chinese tablet nowadays works better than a samsung one. the trick to buy anything chinese is to avoid the copy cats. do not buy anything that looks like a traditional brand knock off. buy something that has its own brand and your good.

also, my work provided newly released tab3 runs slower then my years old hacked hp touchpad btw. way slower!

<comment><USER10> Whic is interestingly what I indeed said further down in that link I posted about my experience with my new phablet.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495854)

Of course, you pay for quality. Things in China are cheaper, but they are also "cheaper". Caveat Emptor most certainly applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm little perplexed on why Samsung is doing this. What is business reasoning behind this? They say it is because to stop resellers from buying handsets from one country or region where devices are cheaper and then selling them to consumers in another country, but Apple has the same problem too.

<comment><USER13> Probably because somebody somewhere within Samsung can quantify the money Samsung has "lost" by people buying through resellers but can't quantify the costs of implementing this short-sighted policy.</comment></comment>


Exodus wallet  password/12 words - <AUTHOR> Hello,<p>I wonder whether my password and my 12-word-phrase is in a local storage of Exodus wallet. Is there a way to find and decrypt my own password ? <comment><USER2> If you lost that, you're done.

With current technology, it would take hundreds (tousands?) of years to crack your phrase.

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did you forget to write it down, or did you write it down wrong? Depending on your answer, you may be able to recover it.</comment>


How to solve the naked domain problem and forward domain.com to www.domain.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.krautcomputing.com/blog/2014/12/09/how-to-solve-naked-domain-problem-forward-non-www-to-www/

<comment><USER2> I rolled my own wwwizer using Nearly Free Speech. I wrote a blogpost here: [http://blog.higg.im/2014/03/10/getting-jque-re-off-the- apex/](http://blog.higg.im/2014/03/10/getting-jque-re-off-the-apex/) I wouldn't rely on third party servers like wwwizer, as they are prone to fail - and will more than likely go down when you least want it to - like getting slashdotted, or mentioned in a high traffic blog

</comment><comment><USER3> If you use a CNAME and the www subdomain, CloudFlare allows you to set a CNAME on the root domain.</comment>


The Road to QUIC - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-road-to-quic/?hn <comment><USER2> If I were developing a new protocol, and I thought more than just web browsers might want to use it, I would develop it as a new standard internet transport protocol. None of this trying to avoid getting industry adoption. Talk to Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Broadcom, TP-Link, Huawei, Foundry, Avaya, Marvell, Foxconn, etc. Get it adopted in silicon and software, and get the industry actually excited about an upgraded protocol. They get to use it to push sales of new devices, so it's great for them. You get to use it to work around stupid intermediary networking issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am so glad to see these old standards (tcp, http) finally being offered a better, more secure alternative. But the most problematic of all in my opinion is smtp. Anyone aware of an equivalent of the quic/http2 initiative for smtp?

dns would be second most problematic one, but like for ipv6, dnssec exists, it is just not used enough to get a chance to take over.

<comment><USER4> It's been a few years since I did server e-mail management, but SMTP/email in 2018 is quite different from SMTP/email in 1985.

For starters all large e-mail exchanges (Gmail/Live) require you to use TLS, so most mx<>mx connections are already secured. Additional protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC are securing origins, messages and reducing spam and spoofing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah but TLS is using STATTLS which is trivially downgradable, most smtp servers on the internet use invalid (selfsigned or expired) certs, and no one validates anything. As for spf, dkim, they are nice hints for spam level but are not used to block spoofed traffic.

So all these features are a thin layer in of lipstick on the pig and don't really make the problem a solved problem.

<comment><USER4> Not blocked, but in Gmail at least you get a nice big red warning if the SPF or DKIM does not match up.

<comment><USER5> Not only that, I've had email outright bounce without those two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think they forgot to change the source port in the NAT diagram.

</comment><comment><USER7> So who are the bad actors they're freezing out with this spec? They mention problems with middle boxes which I've heard before, but no finger pointing.

<comment><USER8> I can't find any mention of "bad actors" or "freezing out" anybody or anything so I'm going to guess you meant just generally which middle boxes are "bad" and the answer is all of them, almost by definition.

The specifications we're dealing with here don't (and in modern protocols, this is quite deliberate) allow for any middleboxes. The only, minimal way to implement such a thing correctly in the face of that situation is to act as a full proxy, which is going to _suck_ for performance and your customers aren't going to pay for a product that throttles their connectivity badly nor for the hardware that would let you run a line speed proxy.

So, they don't, they try to make an end run around the protocol compliance, typically the idea goes something like this:

During connection setup we'll inspect everything and implement whatever rules are key to our product, but mostly we'll pass things between the real client and server transparently, only intervening as necessary for our role

Then, we can "whitelist" most connections, and let them continue at line speed without actually being inspected further.

Unlike a full proxy this design breaks, messily, when optional protocol features are understood by the client and server but not the middlebox. This is because either the middlebox pretends to understand when it doens't (so client and server seem to get their mutually agreed new feature, but if it has any impact on how the protocol is used it breaks mysteriously since the middlebox didn't know) or the middlebox squashes everything it doesn't understand then steps out of the way and expects that to work out OK even though the client and server now misunderstand each other's situation.

<comment><USER9> > generally which middle boxes are "bad" and the answer is all of them, almost > by definition.

NATs and firewalls are the first two classes of middleboxes that come to mind, and I wouldn't consider either of them inherently "bad".

As pointed out in the article, NATs suffer from the shortcoming that without visibility into stream semantics (e.g. SYNs / RSTs / FINs), they often fall back to using arbitrarily set timeouts that can sever long-lived connections (e.g. an idle SSH session, where messages might be infrequent).

In my view, "bad" middleboxes are those that lead to protocol ossification -- TLS 1.3 (also from the article) is a good example of that. With encrypted control state, middleboxes (without cooperation by one of the endhosts) are forced to treat QUIC packets as opaque UDP blobs.

Part of the problem is that some middleboxes don't actually follow the robustness principle, and will in fact strip unrecognized protocol options or drop the packets entirely.

<comment><USER10> NAT are objectively bad in the sense that it's a violation of protocol standards and, like seen in the article, breaks stuff that should work.

This makes it harder (often prohibitively hard) to develop and improve new protocols and applications.

<comment><USER9> That's not inherent to the provided functionality, but rather an implementation detail of existing boxes.

There are objectively bad NATs, yes, but extending the lifetime of IPv4 by 20 years and providing isolation between internal and external networks are not inherently bad.

<comment><USER10> NA(P)T is fundamentally incompatible with the guarantees set out by the IP standards that specify packets to be transmitted unmodified end-to-end. Their entire idea is to change the IP address and higher-level protocol identifiers such as ports.

A basic case that they break is when applications embed IP addresses in the data. The "timeout" problem in the article is also impossible to avoid in a guaranteed-correct way, since the NA(P)T can not know when a flow is finished and the mapping is safe to recycle.

Since these things are basically forbidden by the standards, their functionality has never been standardized. Hence the wild west of varying timeouts, heuristics, and various more-or-less broken attempts to munge application-level data (ALG).

<comment><USER11> > NA(P)T is fundamentally incompatible with the guarantees set out by the IP > standards that specify packets to be transmitted unmodified end-to-end.

A small nitpick, but some fields of the IP packet are meant to be modified in transit. For instance, the TTL, the ECN marking bit, and the fragment fields. The checksum field is defined so it can be updated (without being recomputed) to match these changes.

But yeah, other than these fields in the IP header, and a few hop-by-hop headers or options, packets are not meant to be modified in transit (other than fragmentation, but this applies once the packet fragments are put together).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody have data (or some sort of formal analysis) comparing protocol overhead between TCP and QUIC?

<comment><USER13> Not specifically overhead, but there are general benchmarks covering a variety of situations: [https://blog.apnic.net/2018/01/29/measuring-quic-vs-tcp- mobi...](https://blog.apnic.net/2018/01/29/measuring-quic-vs-tcp-mobile- desktop/)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for this. It's very informative, even though it's not the packet-level analysis I was initially looking for.

>However, we observed that QUIC performs significantly worse than TCP when the network reorders packets (Figure 2).

>Upon investigating the QUIC code, we found that in the presence of packet reordering, QUIC falsely infers that packets have been lost, while TCP detects packet reordering and increases its NACK threshold.

Under what conditions does packet ordering usually occur?

From the looks of the figures, it seems like packet-reordering is a function of the x-axis value (rate-limit of some sort?).

What's going on here? Does anybody know?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds very interesting indeed. I wish more of those secure protocols would focus more on some sort of obfuscation. This is to stop repressive regimes from simply blocking all this impressive privacy tech, yielding zero actual benefit to end users.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know about differences between gQUIC and new QUIC, but I always hate gQUIC to the level that I always disabled it on my machine. Main reason being that my ISP always prioritize TCP over UDP, so during congested period (6-10pm), gQUIC is useless.

<comment><USER16> Should't that hate be directed to your ISP?

<comment><USER17> Yes, but being that most people have very little choice in their choice of ISP, so much hate has already been directed at them with little change in outcome, directing hate at any other group is more effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too much complexity.

I find it interesting how everything has to be encrypted and 'secure' now. The excuse is always the NSA, but let's be honest: A new transport protocol isn't going to protect you from them. I think there's a lot more to the cellular baseband and Intel ME backdoors than anyone can imagine.

Google is going to do the same thing with this they did with HTTPS. Soon enough, you'll be penalized through search and/or Chrome for not supporting it.

<comment><USER4> The incentive for Google is that all browsers support QUIC, it saves them a lot of hardware costs and increases performance. They couldn't care less if your website uses QUIC.

You're receiving downvotes because you're propagating the "pushing encryption is motivated by Google's evil agenda" that's currently in vogue with a subsection of HN commenters, for reasons unknown to me because quite frankly the arguments are ridiculous.

<comment><USER19> > all browsers support QUIC

Try blocking your network's access to www.google-analytics.com (with a fast- loading block notice page) and you will see that most webpages become unusable with a 30-second delay before page load completes.

If QUIC only works when the network has no partitions, then QUIC doesn't work.

<comment><USER20> I block Google Analytics and experience no such delay.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Digg and AOL Reader: Feedly Alternatives I Like - <AUTHOR> http://wpdaily.co/digg-aol-reader/

<comment><USER2> I totally agree. All other options did not satisfy my need for a replacement.</comment>


Facebook talked ice buckets twice as much as Ferguson - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/09/02/facebook-twitter-ferguson-icebucketchallenge/14818505/

<comment><USER2> Could you take this to mean that Facebook is used more like an escape and less of a venue for intellectual discussion?

I wonder what is the ice bucket/Ferguson ratio on Hacker News...</comment>


How We Just Lost $1M and the Hardest Product Decision We've Ever Made - <AUTHOR> https://www.leadpages.net/blog/how-we-lost-1m-drip-update/ <comment><USER2> I was board incredibly fast, the popups were distracting and then the tone of the text didn't hook me back into it beyond the title.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or just use mautic for free</comment>


Trunk.ly picks up the torch of delicious, and evolves it with social search... - <AUTHOR> http://tnw.co/eq15Wb

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR - We've launched a new type of social search with <http://trunk.ly>, where you can search a group of people (experts if you like) that you follow for the information they share online.

That title is a call back to an article we posted here on HN just before Christmas inviting you to our beta <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567> The HN community feedback helped push us to throw open the doors and make Trunk.ly live.

Over the last three months, Trunk.ly has continued to grow steadily, attracting new users and we've been thinking a lot about how people use the site and what we can do to significantly improve it.

So introducing the new <http://trunk.ly> \- with improved social search.

Now the site not only has personal utility for you (by collecting links where ever and however you share them across the internet, then indexing them so you have a "personal google" of content you like), but you can now search the people and their links on Trunk.ly too.

Our observation was that one of the things that people do when they publicly share content, is express an interest or expertise. If you're a Python programmer, you probably share lots of Python links, and more importantly, you only share the links that you think are worthy of some attention. So why not enable a search that lets you tap that knowledge?

We did and it's now live - love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Would you use it? What else would be useful as a search experience and content discovery from people you follow?

Thanks!</comment>


Cassandra Explained: An Intro to the Cassandra Data Model - <AUTHOR> http://arin.me/blog/wtf-is-a-supercolumn-cassandra-data-model

<comment><USER3> This happens to be an oldie but a goody. On the same topic, I might as well spread the wealth of links I've amassed for learning and understanding Cassandra:

Up and Running With Cassandra [http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and- runnin...](http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-running-with- cassandra/)

Building A Small Cassandra Cluster <http://posulliv.com/?p=149>

Cassandra PHP CRUD Class (Pandra) <http://github.com/mjpearson/Pandra>

Getting Started - <USER2> <http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/GettingStarted>

Cassandra In Action <http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in- action.html>

<comment><USER4> Twissandra is also a good one, it's a simple Twitter clone built on Cassandra - <http://github.com/ericflo/twissandra>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coincidentally, I came across this article on my own last weekend. Definitely a great read if you're trying to learn Cassandra, though it doesn't explain _why_ you should learn it.

Does anyone know of a resource that clearly explains the advantages and disadvantages of the various RDBMS alternatives?

<comment><USER6> <https://nosqleast.com/2009/slides/sarkissian-cassandra.pdf> is pretty good</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's compensation like in the greater Boston area? - <AUTHOR> Where's a reliable place to learn about compensation in the area? I'm still new to the GBA too so I don't have a large network. I'm also getting different and conflicting info from my Google searches. I'm happy to go to any events if it helps grow my contact list and meet others in the industry.
A little about me: I have close to 2 years experience with python, C++, AWS, Jenkins, and Concourse. I've done a lot of DevOps-type work over the last year, and I'm getting my Kubernetes app developer cert shortly.
Thank you in advance!
*Edited for clarity. <comment><USER2> Levels.fyi leans towards the larger companies, but it can be valuable for getting a sense of the higher range of salaries in the area:

[https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...](https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Boston)

[https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...](https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=Cambridge%2C%20MA)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very useful - thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where have you looked? Glassdoor salaries? Cost of living comparisons between GBA and places you're familiar with? At the end of the day, your salary is whatever you can get. Go apply for some jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure about dev-ops specifically, but eng salaries for 1-2 years experience are around 70-90k in general.

I would expect dev ops to be around that, maybe slightly lower.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can I ask you how to increase your score?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do mean by score? Do you mean HN karma?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Side Project Ideas? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for something to build in my spare time. Preferably a website or webapp. <comment><USER2> A comparison site for hospital prices.

These have to legally be made available by each hospital for all services they provide (since January 1, 2019).

At the moment they're hard to find, often buried on the hospital's website and not easy comparable to other hospitals in the area.

A kayak-like site for health procedures would be very useful.

<comment><USER3> Comparison site for anything is sorely missing. I needed a comparison site for babysitters, or one for medical insurance. We've got a unicorn which only does comparison for financial services.

So I'm thinking another idea is making a comparison or listing site generator. These sites are very light in terms of tech, heavy in research and operations work, so they're too hard for both the techies and the experts in a field.

<comment><USER4> but how one can earn from X comparison sites? Not everyone offers affiliates. Or, am I missing something about the business model?

<comment><USER2> Question was about side projects with no stated incentive.

Business model is not clear at this stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One simple way could be to pick up project based in a technology stack you know. I will follow up with an example, see this book [1], about good python projects.

What you can do is, read the description of each project and do it yourself. Don't look at the solution in the book, then when you are done, compare. If some project excites you further, you can probably extend it so if the book offers a CLI solution, may be write a GUI for it and so on.

The trick with side projects is to build momentum and I hope this technique could be helpful. Have fun doing your side project.

[1] [https://nostarch.com/impracticalpythonprojects](https://nostarch.com/impracticalpythonprojects)

</comment><comment><USER6> A FAAS (function as a service) provider, but with GPU support.

</comment><comment><USER7> An app where employees can vote the options for menu in office Kitchen/Pantry. May be employees can vote weekly/monthly once.

<comment><USER8> have you invented a piece of paper and pen placed in the kitchen? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about a website or webapp? should only take spare time. If i were to do something, that qualifies

</comment><comment><USER10> I had the same "problem" and created a static site generator [0] in both Python and Perl (as a learning exercise in the former case). I blog daily using this program [1].

[0] [https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog](https://github.com/john- bokma/tumblelog)

[1] [https://plurrrr.com/](https://plurrrr.com/)

FWIW; I am looking for beta testers ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is so broad. What are your interests? Easy enough to rattle some ideas with a bit of help.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's your goal? Learn technology? project that may turn into a business? a game?

<comment><USER13> ya goal???</comment></comment>


The Real Truth Behind Foxconn's Suicide Cluster - <AUTHOR> http://micgadget.com/3793/the-real-truth-behind-foxconns-suicide-cluster/

<comment><USER2> The article states that there are 9 suicides among 400,000 Foxconn factory workers in China in half a year. The suicide rate in China is 14 per 100,000 ♪. Thus the Foxconn employee suicide rate is significantly less (9 vs. 28) than the expected amount.

♪ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)

<comment><USER3> I'd think you'd need to at minimum adjust for age; I'm wondering is their workers are younger than average and if those older kill themselves more often than average, but anyway you look at it I'm sure the distribution is not simple.</comment></comment>


Facebook Won't Hire You for Its Data Center - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/facebook-won-t-hire-you-for-its-data-center <comment><USER2> Wonder why there aren't claw backs in the contracts.</comment>